From the Rhizome Archives: Code As Creative Writing--An Interview with John F. Simon, Jr. by Jon Ippolito

By Rhizome

mar 31, 2011

In this series of posts, we will be reblogging content from Rhizome's Archives, available here. This interview with John F. Simon, Jr., conducted by Jon Ippolito, comes from Rhizome's former publication, the Rhizome Digest. It was published on March 23, 2002. You can peruse old editions of the Rhizome Digesthere.

Big thanks to Rhizome's curatorial fellow Natalie Saltiel for help with this post.

This interview took place in January 2002, on the occasion of the
Guggenheim's acquisition of John Simon's Unfolding Object. More info at
http://www.guggenheim.org/internetart.

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Jon Ippolito: You've been working on or near the cutting edge of digital
art since the mid-1980s, when you were programming image-processing
routines for CCD [charge-coupled device] photography. Yet you often cite
sources of inspiration from the world of pen and brush rather than the
world of pixel and browser, and I see some of these influences of
Modernism-for example, the influence of Paul Klee in your plotter
drawings [1994-95] and Sol LeWitt in Combinations [1995]. What is it
about those artists that speaks to you?

John F. Simon, Jr.: I am interested in analytical approaches to
creativity. A new technology doesn't erase a life's work of thoughtful,
creative production. The ideas are bigger than the medium. There are
many examples in art history where artistic practice could be described
as algorithmic-an approach to experimentation by rule making, including
LeWitt and Conceptual artists in the 1970s also Paul Klee in the 1920's
along with many other Bauhaus professors.

An even older example would be Dominican priest-scholar Sebastien
Truchet's 1722 work on the use of combinations in tile design. His study
uses square tiles of two colors that are divided diagonally. He assigned
a letter to each of the four possible orientations of this kind of tile.
He then made lists of letters describing the sequence and orientation
for laying out the tiles. The lists functioned like instructions or
programs for constructing the design. Craftsmen would pick a pattern out
of his book and use the lists of letters as assembly instructions.
Another even older example would be the analytical techniques used in
the design of the Alhambra and in much Islamic art.

JI: Is there a single artist or movement you can point to as an
influence on Unfolding Object? Where did the idea for this project come
from?

JS: The idea for Unfolding Object comes from many sources. Physicist
David Bohm theorizes about a level of information below the quantum
level where all matter is interconnected. In his terminology, the object
unfolds information about itself. The outward expression of an object is
the unfolding of this potential.

I detected a similarity between Bohm's description of nature and
software objects. The potential for the Unfolding Object is contained in
the source code, which is not displayed on the screen but functions on a
different level. The expression of the code, its unfolding, is decided
by the interaction of the code with the person unfolding it.

Another source was Klee, who wrote about how a drawing is defined by its
"cosmogenic moment," when the symmetry of the blank page is broken by
the first mark-the first decision of the creator. Gilles Deleuze also
considers The Fold [1993] and its relationship to the process of
formation.

From my own thoughts about drawings as diagrammatic records of
decisions, I wanted to create a software object that would reveal its
history. I am also fascinated by the implicit potential that a software
object has in its programming.

JI: Virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier has described virtual reality as
an experiment in alternative physics. You've created an object that
appears to inhabit normal euclidean space yet has a mathematical
extensibility beyond anything in our physical environment. When you
envisioned this work, did you ever see yourself as bending the laws of
nature in the service of art?

JS:Which laws of nature? Newton's? I think that nowadays artistic
conceptions of reality can hardly keep up with the non-local, non-
euclidean, non-linear scientific theories of the natural world.

My interest is in relativist mathematics that have no concept of
infinity. I want Unfolding Object to exist in a relativist space where
it defines, as much as possible, the shape of its space. I want to avoid
the Cartesian picture plane, with a horizon and vanishing point. I don't
want to conceptualize the whole space from the beginning-I want the
object to create the space as it unfolds. Of course, this idea is
limited when you have to use a computer screen and perspective
projection to visualize the thing.

JI: Are you inspired by particular gizmos that help you avoid these
kinds of limitations? I'm thinking of the drawings executed with a
pressure-sensitive stylus and ink plotter, or your wall-mounted
sculptures made from exposed Powerbook innards, or your recent acrylic
panels cut with an industrial laser.

JS: I think it's the gizmos that create the limitations. All the works
you mention are concerned with algorithmic possibilities. There are many
technologies that can be used to explore possibilities especially if you
can program them. I switch to a new technology when I feel like it can
shed some light or offer a different perspective on a bigger idea.

JI: Yet working online requires you to settle for the most abundant
technology, like Netscape or Explorer, rather than the most specialized.

JS: Actually, I think browsers are highly specialized and limited while
Powerbooks seem abundant with a much less restricted development
environment.

JI: I guess I'm wondering whether you find it more challenging to make
an alluring work for the Internet, given that its display hardware is
mundane rather than precious.

JS: Who can say what the next display hardware will be? Maybe someone
will design a precious screen to view my online work. An undefined
context is by far the biggest obstacle for designing and experiencing
online art. Many qualities that define other artwork cannot be
considered with online work. This can be liberating but also detract
from the overall impression. There is no control of display with online
work. The best that can be done is hope that whoever views it will focus
only on the window in which your piece is displayed and not have too
many other distractions on the desktop-or surrounding the computer.
Making my LCD [liquid crystal display] panels was a reaction to this
situation, an attempt to have more control of the display environment.

What I try to do online is design an artwork that relies on a strong
concept, whose qualities as an artwork don't depend on any specific
colors or display speed or viewing environment. This takes away a lot of
decisions but puts more emphasis on understanding the limits and
refining the concept.

JI: Your work has not obeyed a strict progression, from, say, pen-and-
ink to animated paintings to Internet-based projects. Do you ever feel
like you are jumping forwards and backwards, creating art to fill in
gaps in art history?

JS: I don't think the concept of progress applies to art the way it does
to technology, so the idea of a "strict progression" may also be poorly
applied or assume too much about how or why art is made. If you look at
my art over a longer term, say the last fifteen years, I think what you
see is a continued push to visualize and activate complex ideas. I
choose whatever materials I think are appropriate to lock down an idea
or get to what I want to see.

JI: You were one of the first artists I know to have figured out new
economic models for selling digital artworks. I'm thinking particularly
of the low-cost multiples available at your "souvenir shop" , which
offers art in everyone's price range, or the edition of Unfolding Object
you've contemplated for collectors' desktops. Last year you even
published a brochure about your art that emulated the look and function
of a corporation's annual report. This approach seems at odds with the
attitude of many online artists of your generation, for whom the
Internet offered a space outside of the profit-driven art market. Do you
think every artist should have a business plan?

JS: I think every artist should have a plan for paying their expenses so
they can devote their full energies to their art.

JI: You've adapted your work Every Icon [1996] for the Web, for a
Powerbook screen, and for a Palm Pilot. The way you've re-created the
same work in different platforms has encouraged me to think that
translations from one medium to another may be the best preservation
strategy for digital art [as outlined in the Variable Media
Initiative]. Does the fact that you've
already sold these different formats as different artworks make it
easier or harder to imagine preserving them via a protocol like variable
media?

JS: Easier, because what was sold in each case was a software license.
Every Icon is the simplest example because it is primarily carried by
the concept. There are no issues of processor speed/timing, color,
display size. It works most everywhere so many of the translation issues
are already solved by example. Of all my pieces, it is easiest to
imagine this piece being preserved by porting the code to whatever is
the "system du jour." It is also, by far, the simplest piece of code.

JI: Many of your works are, in fact, primarily programming code. How do
you think this work relates to the "artist software" genre, works like
the Web Stalker, FloodNet, or Auto-Illustrator ?

JS: I think what I am programming is quite different but I like those
projects and think they are important. For me, what's important is that
a piece of software can be considered an artwork, and that writing
software is as creative as it is technical, and the choices made for
language, data structure, methods, etc., are significant creative
choices.

JI: In most online artworks, the code can be separated from the visual
result. I am thinking of the difference between the Web page Netscape or
Explorer shows you and the HTML or scripting that View Source shows you.
This separation doesn't normally exist with other artworks-LeWitt being
the obvious exception. An elegant page written with a simple JavaScript
"for" loop and document.write could generate the same visual result as a
messy HTML document with loose tags that's ten times as long.

Do you see any aesthetic difference between a work elegantly coded by a
programming perfectionist versus a kludge that happens to generate the
same experience for the viewer?

JS: How important do you consider craftsmanship in fine art? There is no
right or wrong way to code. What you write and the way you write it
reveal yourself.

Whatever you see on screen and in View Source reflects the resources and
choices of the person who put the page together. Some people care more
about how the HTML and JavaScript source looks than others. I know some
people embed messages as comments in their Web pages that are not
visible in the browser. Some painters finish the sides of their canvases
and others choose to leave them raw. There is a difference in the way
each one looks. I usually only ask: is the choice appropriate to the
work?

Personally, I don't pay much attention to the way my HTML looks. Unless
it is part of the project, I make the HTML as plain as possible or
accept whatever the default is from an editing program. I usually only
care about how the pages function in the browser.

JI: Must an artist be a programmer to make truly original online art?

JS: Truly original? You Modernist!

Whether you make art or not, understanding programming is an amazing
understanding.

JI: You have said:

"Once you write a piece of software and run it on the computer, then it
is a very fluid language. Every variable that you choose in the software
becomes subject to expansion, and you can make lookup tables to vary
parameters or you can have functions that are varied by random
numbers...Sometimes you get things that look the way you expected them
to look, and sometimes they are completely different." [Interview by
Tilman Baumgaertel on Nettime]

I think you put your finger here on a common misunderstanding of both
computer-based art and the analog "Conceptual art" that you point to as
an influence on your work. Does it bother you that some people misread
algorithmic art as simply the demonstration of some mathematical
tautology, and hence a purely cerebral exercise? What, if anything,
should artists do to counteract such a misreading?

JS: I practice what I call a "creative writing" style, as opposed to a
"problem solving" style, of writing software. I can say that I have only
really been able to practice this style for a few years. I believe I am
just finding out what it means to code with this awareness so I can't
say how it should be read. There are a lot of misperceptions about code
because it varies as much as the number of people writing it. The only
way artists can improve people's understanding of software is to keep
creating and understanding it ourselves.